- 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Role
- 6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Statement
For 56 years, Häagen-Dazs had a consistent message: high-quality, old-fashioned ice cream for sale. But that's changed: Thanks largely to millennials, the company recently refreshed its brand with a revised logo, more vibrant packaging, new flavors and a global advertising campaign.
Maintaining your culture when moving to another country can be difficult, in particular, if you've been trying to immerse yourself into the new culture to deal with culture shock and adjustment to your new community. But it's important to know that just because you're adapting to a new culture doesn't mean you need to let go of the old. Yet it’s through your connections to other people that you find the biggest rewards. Deepen your relationships with friends, family, your partner, peers, and coworkers using these tips. Smiling at another person is one of the simplest ways to connect with them, and it only takes a second. Your brand identity will form the core of everything you do as a business. Yet with so many different online platforms, it can be difficult to keep that identity consistent. Failing to do so can have a negative impact on the way your business operates, and is likely to confuse customers, clients, and employees. 4) Launch Your Rebrand Internally First. An internal launch can be considered a soft launch. It’s the best way to get everyone on board, work out any kinks, and bring the whole team into the brand story so that they can best represent the brand. A few ways to do that: Launch 4-6 weeks before the public launch.
Related: 9 Cool Ways You Can Uses a lesson to be learned here: To stay competitive, any entrepreneur or leader has to consider the many challenges of a constantly evolving business landscape, including his or her company's and consumer trends.
If you wait to consider how your audiences have changed and will continue to , you'll risk far more than will your competitors already investing in brand analysis and audience outreach.
Expanding your tent
Business leaders may be aware of the changing marketplace, but that doesn't mean they're eager to change. For many companies, a major brand overhaul often meets with internal resistance; and to be fair, such an overhaul is not always the right answer. For some companies, it's better to maintain a consistent brand message amidst rapid change. It's the discovery that's important, the self-assessment, the long view.
Because we live in an experience-based , whether you're designing your intentionally or not doesn't matter: You're still delivering one. Messaging plays a major role in reinforcing or diluting that experience. Here are four steps you can take to help your business appeal to new demographics.
1. Develop robust personas.
Every landing page, blog post or article you put out there should align with a distinct persona to effectively connect with a desired . A CEO, a parent and a college student all require different messaging to inspire a response.
A seemingly obvious but often overlooked way to gain a better understanding of your current or potential customers' needs is to ask them directly. Surveys can be effective, but personal, one-on-one interviews are better, even if you can only conduct a handful. Offer a small incentive to gather eager participants, and ask questions designed to reveal what motivates them and why they chose your product or service.
At Pharos, we need to shift our messaging to highlight the parts of our business that are relevant to each specific persona we target. We use three aspects of our to position ourselves in a way that aligns with what our audience cares about most. Print management solutions lower expenses (business owners love that), improve security (CIOs and IT directors love that) and boost sustainability (which should resonate with everyone). All three messages mutually reinforce one other and are consistent across experiences.
For example, we worked with one university's leadership who wanted to reduce and manage back-office printing costs. To help get employees on board with secure print workflows, its leaders promoted the sustainability aspect of print management's value proposition and subsequently were able to save $3,000 a month while significantly reducing the university's carbon footprint.
2. Ask what your CRM data is trying to tell you.
If your data collection process includes a wide range of questions to qualify leads, you should be able to find customer information such as company type and size, contact job titles and the types of content most often consumed.
Your team should then be able to help translate those numbers into concrete characteristics and create a more complete understanding of your customers. As you find common trends, you can combine those tendencies into a general view of each customer type, and use it to fill out your personas. This will help diversify your buyer personas and, consequently, your brand's ability to connect with an expanding range of consumers.
Related: After Realizing Customers Didn't Share Her Vision, an Entrepreneur Makes a Big Change -- And Sales Grew More Than $3 Million
Evaluating your data can also help you recognize surprising audiences that like your brand. When the software company Hatchbuck was launched, its founders tried to reach as many segments as possible, from salespeople to business owners, to pitch its platform.
To zero in on its ideal customer, Hatchbuck gathered survey responses, crunched the numbers and conducted customer interviews, seeking to define its buyers' behaviors and beliefs. The company was surprised to learn that, even though it had been attracting larger companies looking for an affordable software with lots of features, smaller companies were its biggest supporters. Hatchbuck decided to focus its efforts on these small business owners -- its ideal customer. Discoveries like this can be enlightening and critical to success.
3. Showcase how your brand delivers what people want.
Proving your product's relevance to a different demographic doesn't mean abandoning the things that make it valuable to current buyers. It means adjusting your messaging to highlight the benefits that are more aligned with the new audience.
Blocked outloud games game. For example, Vera Bradley bags and luggage have been a popular choice for baby boomer women since the 1980s. When the brand decided to expand its target audience and appeal to younger women, it tapped into social media to gain insights into the demographic and observed a trend of complaints among millennials about the shortcomings of smartphone battery life and the annoyance of awkward battery cases.
So Vera Bradley created a bag with a built-in smartphone charger. This helped to improve its offerings and reach a new audience without introducing change that might alienate its faithful, long-time customers.
4. Leverage the granularity of marketing automation.
Many businesses see demographics as an aggregate average, but this perspective can destroy any chance of recognizing the need to change. You don't target youth through the same channels used to reach company decision-makers.
Approaching demographics using too broad of a viewpoint ignores the micro-targeting capability afforded by many marketing-automation systems today. Granular, personalized messaging is becoming the norm, not the exception.
Scoring with playoff points spreads. To reach younger demographics with precision, take advantage of automation tools such as , Marketo or Hatchbuck, proven technologies that can drastically improve the reach of your ads and provide you with valuable analytics on your consumers.
These automation technologies have a long track record of producing a positive return on your investment. They can also help to improve various aspects of your digital marketing strategy. According to research by Regalix, 64 percent of marketers surveyed said they saw benefits within six months by using automation software.
Related: Content as a Service Is the Next Evolution for Marketing
The millennials in today's workforce will be the decision-makers of tomorrow -- and I mean tomorrow, not five years from now. Organizations that fail to recognize this shift, or delay the process of discovering how best to change along with new demographic opportunities, can end up fueling internal resistance to such change and, ultimately, lose their opportunity to stay relevant.
6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Role
6 Ways To Refresh Your Brand And Maintain An Identity Statement
Don't be one of them.